Former student jailed for US political hack attacks

Zombiemaster used botnet to gag conservative talking heads

A US student began a 30-month sentence on Friday after he was convicted of using a network of compromised PCs he established to flood the websites of conservative politicians and pundits.

Mitchell L Frost, 23, of Bellevue, Ohio, had earlier admitted launching denial of service attacks against the websites of Bill O'Reilly, Rudy Giuliani and others between 2006 and March 2007, Security Weekreports. He also coughed to launching a denial of service attack on the University of Akron, the university where he was enrolled at the time of the March 2007 attack.

The assault knocked Akron offline for more than eight hours, obliging a subsequent clean-up operation that cost the university $10,000.

Frost was ordered to pay $10,000 in restitution to the university and a further $40,000 to Bill O’Reilly.com. After he gets out of jail, Frost will spend a further three years on parole.

The former student also admitted to harvesting personal data from compromised machines including user names, passwords and credit card numbers. It is unclear how much, if anything, he raked in via fraudulent abuse of this information. It could be the compromised details were used to buy and facilitate Frost's politically motivated hack attacks. ®